neighborhood residents and a forum for dia- logue with neighborhood partners and city officials—all of it ultimately geared to shap- ing and advancing an agenda of, by and for the neighborhood’s residents. The idea for At the Table takes its cue from the funding model of creative place- making (although not uncritically), and came out of a conversation in the summer of 2016 between Anne Bluethenthal and Skywatch- ers’ then brand-new senior program man- ager, Clara Pinsky. Pinsky had majored in dance at Wesleyan where her thesis explored community-based performance projects (including Skywatch- ers) as important strategies for equitable community development. She gained first- hand experience in such collaborative com- munity-based projects while working as an assistant choreographer with Allison Orr’s acclaimed Forklift Danceworks in Austin. Pinsky had been speaking with Anne Blu- ethenthal about Skywatchers for two years before moving out to San Francisco in June 2016 to work with the company. No sooner had she started than she saw a deadline for the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Our Town” creative placemaking grant looming. “Clara had been working for a week,” remembers Bluethenthal, “and she said you have to apply for this. We had, by that point, this six-years body of work. It’s all about forefronting the voices of residents. And we now have stuff that people want to say. How do we get that in front of the right people? So that became the idea. How do we bring people to the table?” “I had spent the last year-and-a-half researching creative placemaking and under- standing the field, so it was really easy for me to translate what this program was already doing in the neighborhood into the terms of creative placemaking,” explains Pinsky, who with Bluethenthal has been a principal driv- ing force behind the planning and manage- ment of At the Table . “We were already making artworks that spoke to the lives of residents. That felt fun- damentally important. We just need to frame [ At the Table ] as political work, and we need to leverage partnerships in the neighborhood to position it, so that the voices that we’re capturing in this art-making process are heard. That was the seed of it.” Pinsky says that in envisioning the project, they quickly foregrounded the most salient issue emerging from the resident co-creators in years of regular Skywatchers meetings: the conditions of supportive housing. “We’d been on that path,” notes Blu- ethenthal, “We had this experience with the Dialogue Project , a film project within the Community Housing Partnership, which was about bringing staff, upper administration, and residents to the same table to talk about the conditions. “And now we embark on the next two years, in the same process, but creating new work with this particular idea,” she contin- ues. “What are all the different strategies that we can bring to bear that help us not just do the work we’re doing but with an eye towards positioning that work in the politi- cal context more overtly?” For the better part of the last two years, I have been a small part of the process, serving on an advisory board comprised of people from various Tenderloin community-based organizations, among them CHP, Coalition on Homelessness, Code Tenderloin, Faithful Fools, Tenderloin Neighborhood Develop- ment Corporation (TNDC), and GLIDE. The group acts as a sounding board to Bluethenthal and Pinsky as they develop At the Table , and as liaisons to the organiza- tions and coalitions in the neighborhood whose work resonates with the interests and goals of the project. In fact, At the Table accrues to a larger collective effort underway among local resi- dents, community organizers and anchor institutions—such as the Tenderloin People’s Congress and the Tenderloin Development Without Displacement Initiative—to support the neighborhood’s vulnerable populations in realizing their own collective power, and to stave off the forces of displacement and
Skywatchers / photos by Deirdre Visser
here.’ That to me is kind of remarkable, because I feel like it’s so little, but it means so much.” “So (a) the structure (b) the relationships and (c) the art,” she says, summing up the deliverables from the hard work of the last several years. We’re in dialogue often about things that are very difficult or challenging or even traumatic. And this becomes the mate- rial. We’re making something, out of our- selves, each week—song or poetry or move- ment. I actually feel it has its own beauty and ‘just rightness’ [but] just the act of doing it is life-affirming. The act of doing it together
improve conditions for themselves and oth- ers living at the margins. Such traces of self-awareness, connection and solidarity, which map onto what Pinsky refers to as the “relational ecosystem” of the neighborhood, might be the most signifi- cant short-term result from the preceding two years’ work. At the same time, as “out- comes” they are notably hard to quantify. “They’re not what you would normally put in a grant,” admits Bluethenthal, dur- ing a conversation in March. “But here’s the thing: We are actually creating structure. I mean literally. People come and they say, ‘This is the thing that I count on every week. There’s very little structure in my life. And I know I can count on every Wednesday after- noon that there will be a loving community
is community-building. And the glue of the whole thing is that we’re generating love.” How does a process like this conclude in one three-day festival? It doesn’t, admits Bluethenthal. “It’ll just evolve into something else.” ROBERT AVILA is a San Francisco-based arts writer who has covered theater, dance, film and perfor- mance for the San Francisco Bay Guardian , Ameri- can Theatre , San Francisco Chronicle , and other publications. He also writes at povertyartsjournal. com. Since 2016, he works as director of communi- cations at GLIDE.
Skywatchers presents At the Table: Visions Festival : May 17-19, Kelly Cullen Community Center Auditorium, SF. abdproductions.org/skywatchers
at the Angel IslAnd ImmIgrAtIon stAtIon sAturdAys & sundAys 5/4–5, 5/11–12, 5/18–19 11Am or 1Pm dreams of fl ight and PremIere of the sequel Within these Walls the Award Winning by lenora lee dance
A Choreographic Rock Opera by LILI WECKLER | Unhinge With Musical Direction by JEN MELLER SAT. May 25th 6:30-7:30 pm SUN. MAY 26TH 5:00-6:00 pm San franCISco INTERNational arts FESTIVAL 2019 fort mason chapel
www.sfiaf.org (2019 program > dance) Updates on instagram: @l i l i annjeree
lenoraleedance.com
in dance MAY 2019
Made with FlippingBook Annual report